GreenPrint

So this is interesting: GreenPrint. It’s a software add-on that checks your printouts for waste pages, like those legal disclaimers, logo pages, blank pages with nothing but a URL on them, etc., that often show up when you print from the web. It makes suggestions for which pages might be wasted, so that you can remove them from the print job before it starts. You can also remove images and banner ads from webpage printouts. GreenPrint also works with Word documents.

The Windows XP/Vista version is free; the Mac version seems to be a 30-day trial. There’s a PDF writer included, which is handy if you want to make PDFs of webpages with banner ads removed. GreenPrint runs in your system tray, so it’s on in the background all the time.

The software can tell you how many pages you’ve saved in total since you started using it. They have a counter on their website showing how many pages, trees and pounds of CO2 have been saved by their product – if these are accurate statistics, that means the downloaded software is tracking printouts and sending that information back to them. So depending on what your privacy concerns are, that’s something to keep in mind.

Anyways, it’s a neat idea. We try to reduce paper waste around this office as much as possible – we only buy recycled paper, and we do all our for-internal-use printing on blank-on-one-side pages that I salvage from the photocopy room at the university library. But anything that cuts it down further is very handy. I’ll let you know if I have any problems with this program.